A friend and colleague of mine who does human rights work alongside me mentioned recently that she went on vacation and left her work phone off the whole time, only to fear when she turned it back on she would learn someone she’d been in touch with had been murdered the night before. It wouldn’t […]
Category: Updates
Updates to my life, where I currently am, what I’m currently doing, and what I’m currently thinking. Sometimes, the line between “essay” and “update” is a bit blurry.
Art and the Sacred in the Unexpected
Most every concert I’ve ever been to, when the main act starts, the crowd goes wild. Everyone paid for it, everyone anticipated it, everyone is glad it’s finally here. Even when the music was slower, there was always something about that first note that sends the crowd over the edge. There’s one notable exception in […]
R&R in the time of social upheaval
Been on the road a lot lately, which is something I struggle with given that it’s a pandemic, but between N95’s and a vaccine, I’m doing what I can to find the balance I know we’re all seeking. So, between island hoping, West coast adventures, and hiking in the Poconos, the last few weeks have […]
Big moves, tiny mountains
The world of remote work, even if some eventual return means being in the office a few days a week, opened up the doors and possibilities to moving a little farther from the City, and we took the chance. It’s not that we were tired of the City. I will always need to keep one […]
Vaccine.
I got my first vaccine shot today. That’s not really newsworthy; most of us are getting it and I had scheduled to get it a few weeks ago, before New Jersey had opened it up to everyone. Problem was, the only location available was in upstate New York, so rather than rescheduling once Jersey opened […]
One Year, Alive.
I told myself after a year of “quarantine,” of “surviving” a pandemic, after documenting the months and months of it, that it was only fitting to make sure, one year on, that I would document that too. It’s like a rite of passage, is it not? All the loss and all of the loneliness and […]
Charged with Terrorism for Speaking Truth to Power
One of my colleagues has been named a terrorist by the Egyptian government. Authoritarian regimes, it turns out, don’t like it when human rights organizations criticize their efforts to quell dissent. For now, my colleague is safe, as he lives in the United States, yet in retaliation, Egypt has jailed and tortured his cousin and […]
Quarantine, Day 327, Or Cat Theology
Sometimes, when the house is particularly quiet, you can hear Freya’s paws pitter-patter across the hardwood floor, and having never had an indoor cat, there’s something special to me about the way she moves with this persistant grace that always brings me calm and gets me excited at the same time. She’s taken sometimes to […]
Quarantine, Day 300: New Year’s Eve Edition
The blankets are all over the floor even though I prefer them folded and put away when they aren’t in use. I have like five pillows from the bedroom that have ended up in the living room over the course of the last few days, and I just haven’t bothered to move them. To my […]
Quarantine, Day 281
It’s been two hundred eighty-one days now since I began quarantine, and while it’s probably not fair anymore to say I’m actively in quarantine, the pandemic has now consumed 75% of this year and is worse today than it ever was when it began. I’m writing for the first time in a while, having not […]
saunterings 